Jeremy Naylor's training yard on the edge of Salisbury Plain is drenched in racing history. Sceptre, who won four of the five Classics in 1902, was trained here. Her owner, the gambler and journalist Robert Sievier, lived in the house next door, and it was here, two decades later, that Lady Torrington conducted a scandalous affair with the jockey Steve Donoghue. A couple of miles away, just over a century ago, the Hermits of Salisbury Plain planned some of the greatest gambles in turf history.

When it comes to the business of training horses, though, Naylor might well suggest that history is bunk. On first inspection, as the staff prepare for morning exercise, his yard looks much like any other. But then you notice the wires attached to the saddlecloths, and the chunky wristwatches that seem to come as standard, which are all part of Naylor's pioneering approach to training.

The wires are attached to a heart-rate monitor, while the watch gives the work rider an instant reading of both of beats-per-minute and speed. "We tend to use them on our wrists," Naylor says as he pulls up at the top of his gallop, "but if you want you can rig them up between the horse's ears, like a dashboard."

They say that training is an art, but at Cleeve Stables, the aim seems to be to turn it into a science. Both Naylor and his wife Enid, who runs a clinic next door, are qualified vets, and his bookshelves are piled high with texts on equine physiology, metabolism and mechanics. The theory and practice of human fitness is a core subject here too, as much of what Naylor tries to do with horses is, as he says, "already absolutely standard practice when it comes to human athletes".

He does not imagine a day when an MSc is a vital qualification for a trainer. Yet as he points out, "somebody in charge of a Formula One racing team may not be a high-level mechanic, but they will certainly have a pretty good idea of how an internal combustion engine works, and the body work and air intake, and so on.

"Training horses to my mind is all about three things. We are trying to maximise the horse's fitness, while also maximising their motivation, and the other big thing is to also maximise their soundness. They need enough work to get fit, but not lose their motivation or soundness."

The data from every workout by one of Naylor's horses is downloaded to his laptop. Heart-rate and stride patterns, for instance, can be logged against speed and time, while the time required to reach maximum heart-rate, and then to return to the resting level, are among the key indicators of a horse's overall fitness.

"You could argue that the methods used to train horses have changed little in decades, if not centuries," Naylor says. "But look at the turnaround in our Olympic team. A lot of that was due to funding, which doesn't buy better athletes, but does buy better equipment, better management, better training."

Naylor had been a lecturer in exercise science at Washington State University, the full-time vet at Martin Pipe's yard and also in charge of Bristol University's equine sports medicine department before giving up a "job for life with a pension" to set up as a trainer nearly 10 years ago.

"My background was exercising horses and I had a passionate interest in racing so I wanted to put the two together," he says. "Training has always been done by feel, but now, for the first time, we can be objective and structured in our approach."

The figure that matters to punters, of course, is strike-rate, and Naylor's has not, as yet, risen much beyond 10% even in a good year. He is not about to abandon the scientific approach yet, though.

"People say, if you're so smart, how come you aren't rich?," he says, "but it's a question of the stock you have. If you brought Arsène Wenger into Salisbury Town's football team, he's never going to get them to the level of beating Manchester United. As a vet, I tend to get horses that have had problems in the past, but we've had horses that would have been on the scrapheap that we've been able to win races with. I've proved that this is a system that works, and we're really only scratching the surface."